PPC Agencies – The 11 most important questions

11 Questions you should be asking PPC Agencies before you decide which one fits best.

1 ) What’s your track record like?
Most PPC agencies claim to have amazing track records with huge clients spending millions of pounds per year etc. but you need to pick an agency that’s a good fit for you. If you’re a B2B company spending £3,000 per month then a different agency will probably suit you better than if you’re a high street brand spending £100,000 per month so be sure to ask about what kind of clients the agency currently has and what results they’ve seen.

• At Converted we work with a very diverse range of clients which vary between B2B and B2C with spends from £1,000 all the way up to six figures per month, we typically save around 30% of the spend when we take over the PPC management of an existing account, on average we grow sales volumes by around 25% but sometimes this can be as much as 400% when working longer term.

2 ) Is there a minimum contract length?
Many PPC agencies will try to tie you into long one sided contracts where you’re expected to sign up for 6 to 12 months after the initial pitch and all the risk is yours, the agency can just keep your account ticking over and they collect their fees, you often have to pay a release fee to get out of the contract early.

• We aren’t like other PPC Agencies as we just have a rolling 30-day agreement, we feel that any agency that’s good enough should be confident enough to not need to tie you into long term contracts, so it’s simple with us, you simply give us 30 days notice of your intention to take control, and you are free to disable our access at any time as it’s your PPC account not ours.

3 ) How do you calculate your PPC management prices?
Not all PPC Agencies charges for their services in the same way. Some may work on a fixed monthly retainer regardless of the results, while others charge a percentage of your monthly spend, other PPC agencies run hybrid models with a retainer and even performance fees/bonuses.

• We work on a straight percentage of spend model, which means we spend as much as we can for you, BUT and it’s a very important but… this is to your targeted cost per sale, and even then we’ll work to get under the target amount, until eventually we’ve maxed out the sales volume for the best cost per sale for you. Working this way we feel we are incentivised to always be trying to maximise the sales volume at the best cost per sale for you, this helps grow you business, unlike most fixed fee PPC agencies who operate on a “more accounts equals more profit” basis and the only way to grow their agencies is to pile clients higher and higher instead of to grow the client’s business and reap the mutual benefits of this via a percentage of spend model.

4 ) Will the actual PPC Account be mine or the PPC Agencies property?
Some PPC Agencies open and build the search engine account in their name, (or transfer your existing campaigns into their new account) not yours and they then charge you the spend plus their costs, the downside of this is should you wish to leave them to go to another agency they turn your account off and you have to start from scratch in a new account; in most cases with no clue which keywords worked best, which negatives were used etc. so it could cost you considerable money to start from fresh again.

• We don’t do that, at all times it’s your account that we work on, we only have access to it to work on it, you pay the fees directly to the search engine and should you wish to take the account in house or use another agency you are free to do that with no loss of performance, downtime or release fee payable to us. It’s your account; we merely run it as though it was our own account with our own money being spent.

5 ) Will I get regular progress reports?
When you’re investing your money in PPC you need regular reports to know what’s going on and how your money is being spent, having said that too much data can be as bad as not enough, analysis paralysis occurs when too much information is presented so reporting should be functional and useful at all times.

• At Converted we report according to how suits you best, for some clients we report once per month, for others we report more frequently and in more depth. It’s all down to what information you need and when you need it.

6 ) Who will be working on my campaigns?
When are speaking to PPC Agencies, you should ask exactly who would be working on your account. Just because you meet with someone very experienced it doesn’t mean that they will be the ones working on your account; it could be delegated to a junior member of the PPC team.

• We only have experienced PPC staff working on client accounts, all of them have a minimum of two years commercial experience as well as undergoing our in-house training program where we take their existing knowledge and add our own holistic PPC marketing system to it.

7 ) How often will my campaigns be manually reviewed?
Many PPC agencies operate on a “set and forget” basis, they’ll get you on board and tidy up the account, then either move it down to junior PPC staff to manage or set some bid management software running on it which just manages the cost per click of what’s there, it doesn’t continue to break down the account into logical, targeted and tightly themed adgroups which boost the quality score, thus lowering the cost per click naturally, it often only manages the symptoms and doesn’t treat the cause of inflated cost per click.

• We go through the pay per click accounts frequently (from daily to weekly depending on the business focus, sector and traffic volumes) and review the performance, targeting and matching options etc. We run reports to find new keywords to add as well as those that need adding as negative keywords to further refine and increase the quality of the traffic. We are incentivised to spend more at your KPI’s so we review the account as frequently as needed so that account growth is always expedited.

8 ) Do you only focus on PPC search engines or will you advise/help maximise the traffic we are buying by on site testing and improvement.
Some PPC Agencies just do the PPC management and do a good job of it but Google in particular is an ever-evolving beast and simply just managing the PPC side of it isn’t maximising the potential of the traffic any more. More recently conversion optimisation is a key area where we have seen great gains being made.

• Converted has expertise in site and landing page optimisation, it’s hard enough for most merchants to find the traffic these days so we try to ensure it converts at the best rate it can do, simple things can have huge effects so we regularly test elements of a page to ensure the traffic converts as highly as possible.

9) What other services does your company offer?
Most PPC agencies actually do other things too, they’ll probably also be offering SEO, social media marketing, email marketing and a plethora of other things, this may mean the agency is a very big one, but in reality many do all these things only fairly well, a bit like a handyman, they can lay bricks or plumb in a tap but they aren’t as good as a brick layer or plumber at doing the specific task in hand.

• At Converted we only do Pay Per Click marketing, our staff don’t do anything else, there are no other distractions, we do PPC, Google Analytics integration and PPC landing page optimisation, we live and breathe PPC management – no distractions!

10) Can you give examples of how you saved clients money, and what specifically worked.
Many PPC agencies will speak broadly, quoting averages, or make out that PPC management is some dark art when in fact 99% of it is simple processes, this is hard work to get right, to take things to the next level where great savings are made is even harder work, they’ll often deflect your requests for specific examples or case studies by telling you what they would do for your account. However you should keep digging as it’s good to hear how they’ve helped clients in the past so don’t be afraid to keep asking until they give you a good example or two.

• We’ve worked in most sectors over the last 10 years and not only survived but actually thrived in them, We took an adult retailer from spending £20,000 to around £100,000 per month at the same time as reducing the cost per sale by 30% by looking at the lifetime value of customers and creating highly targeted adgroups with focussed adcopy, that were fed by highly specific keywords, as well as a travel company where we reduced their cost per sale by 66% by doing very focussed resort campaigns, adding around 600 more adgroups and 7000% more negatives than were in use previously.

11) What tools do you use to manage search campaigns?
Most PPC agencies will use bid management tools to manage the bids of their clients, these tools vary from basic bid changing tools to advanced portfolio management software, the cost of some of these third party tools is high, in some cases up to 17% of the total spend which leaves very little margin for manual work on the account by a PPC manager, which still needs doing. It’s also worth bearing in mind that using bid management software is only of use if the keywords are running at good quality scores of 7 and upwards or else you’re just changing the price on an overpaying keyword.

• We take a different approach to those ppc agencies, we use simple tools like excel, and actually do the hard work manually, there’s no automated bid management software as the way we manage the account we get the lowest cost per click possible by getting the highest quality score achievable for the keyword that we can, after his bids are only used to really manage ad position, rather than to try to reduce cost.

This isn’t an exhaustive list but it does cover the main points that you need to consider when choosing from the many PPC agencies out there, not only does the deal have to be one that can work, it has to be a good fit, it’s no good simply choosing a PPC agency based on the cost, you need to know they’re capable and can deliver results for you. Many people hear of the fees and think of them as an added cost, yet in most cases PPC agencies will cover their costs in the early days by reducing the wasted advertising spend, then they focus upon adding value by increasing sales and thus having a combined benefits of cost savings, sales growth and the freeing up of in-house resources who no longer have to try to run the pay per click marketing.

We’d love to answer any questions you have regarding pay per click, we don’t take on every potential client that we speak to and we are happy to recommend some other agencies if we feel that they are a better fit for your business so feel free to drop us a line for a no obligation chat or free no obligation AdWords health check.